If Bryan Nesbitt — the super-hot Phoenix-born car designer who gave the world the PT Cruiser before being wooed away from Chrysler by a bigger paycheck from Chevy — had defected instead to Blue Note Records, he might have designed Norah Jones. Like Nesbitt’s instantly iconic car, Jones is a…
They gave each other names. Names that perhaps no other human had ever been given. From now on she would simply be “VV” and he would be known only as “Hotel.” Together they would be The Kills. They would make music, have attitude, and somehow rule the world based only…
Love Jewel. Hate Jewel. Fear her manipulative mom. Laugh at her poetry. Give her props for not fixing that snaggletooth. Marvel at her staying power. Almost seven years ago, I interviewed the fresh-from-Alaska Jewel Kilcher — before she’d sold many copies of her first album. At the time, she’d just…
Imagine, for an instant, that you’ve been granted a wish to vault back in time to that mortifying moment back in middle school when you finally got up enough guts to ask that hottie in Social Studies to your first school dance. Only this time, instead of mumbling some lame…
The premise of the Back to Mine series of dance mix albums is truly innovative. Under the direction of the country’s premier DJ organization, DMC USA, Back to Mine gives featured electronic artists the chance to collect the records — whatever they might be — that they would play for…
Optometry is hardly the first album to mingle jazz, hip-hop and DJ culture. Indeed, it’s not even the first platter to do so on Thirsty Ear. In June 2001, Spring Heel Jack, a London duo that’s rightly viewed as an innovator in the drum ‘n’ bass subgenre, unleashed its own…
Can the music be called Brit pop if the musicians in question take more influences from the Mississippi Delta than from their Liverpool-area origins, as is the case with Gomez? Lacking a better term, the awe-inspiring quintet describes its music as “psychedelic blues.” And while there’s no easy way to…
My landlord knew a drug dealer in high school. The dealer had a bunch of acid stashed in his sock. It was a hot day. His feet got sweaty, and he absorbed most of the blotter. After a week in the emergency room, the guy was still wild-eyed, queasy and…
is, at the..Living Out Loud
When queried in an interview a couple of years ago as to whether he was really the fabled Ugly Casanova, Modest Mouse front man Isaac Brock immediately went all prickly. “Aw, man,” he groaned. “You’ve got to let some things stay a mystery.” And then he set the screen on…
The Stylistics’ Airrion Love is recalling Linda Creed, who in her early 20s penned many of the group’s biggest hits, from “Break Up to Make Up” to “La La Means I Love You.” “She was a beautiful girl,” says the soft-spoken tenor. “She had a uniqueness for lyrics. And that’s…
The stormy one-two punch (“Code Red,” “What I Built Last Night”) that opens the Casket Lottery’s third full-length runs a gamut of rock styles, making shape-shifting noise that hits like a Whippit-induced head rush. Singer and guitarist Nate Ellis, bassist Stacy Hilt and drummer Nathan “Junior” Richardson lock together like…
Jello Biafra’s scathing brand of political commentary won’t pass for comfort food in troubled times: Gooey, patriotic pabulum is best left to star-spangled yokels like Lee Greenwood or Alan Jackson. But the guy takes his anti-punditry as seriously as any free-speech proponent out there. He also has a knack for…
One of the least-used compliments in the average critic’s vocabulary is the word “consistent”; few scribes come out of a great concert exclaiming, “That was one of the most consistent shows ever!” But consistency is an important artistic attribute, particularly for a performer who hungers for career longevity, and Duke…
When you’re a little kid, cursive handwriting seems like such an arcane, esoteric thing: Its strange and indecipherable loops and swirls reduce words to fluid mystery, some secret code shared by grown-ups. By the time you actually reach adulthood, cursive looks juvenile, even quaint — the hormone-inked scrawl of impetuous…
Her voice is a glass of ice water in your sun-dazed hand. Yet its insistent cool can be a problem. As precise as her diction is, and no matter how refined her tone, their reliability makes many listeners hear her newer records as no more than more of the same…
Minimalism. The term has spawned more run-on sentences by pinheaded writers than any other movement. And yet no written word has ever allayed suspicion in this pinhead that there is little more than shuck involved in any minimal installation. In music, when the dread word minimalism rears its head, it…
Solomon Burke is known by many names: Bishop, Reverend, the Doctor, the King. In fact, his official Web site is www.thekingsolomonburke.com. And he often has been referred to as the King of Rock and Soul, whatever that means. Considering his many diverse business activities, which include a string of funeral…
Must be something about Monterrey. Picture it: Every year, the Mexican soccer league has two seasons, winter and summer, and before each season kicks off, there’s excitement in all the Mexican stadiums. Nowhere, though, is the electricity more palpable than in Monterrey, which puts on a jubilant, colorful celebration, complete…
If sharing is caring, DJ Shadow is a poster boy for restless devotion. In the six years since his seminal Endtroducing album, Marin County resident Josh Davis has collaborated with members of Radiohead, the Verve, and the Beastie Boys on U.N.K.L.E.’s gritty trip-hop LP, Psyence Fiction; produced Bay Area hip-hop…
Bluegrass music is full of hotshot musicians, but only a handful qualify as true innovators. Jerry Douglas, the extraordinary Dobro player, belongs to that exclusive club. He took an ungainly instrument with a relatively limited musical vocabulary and found a way to coax a variety of sounds from it: sweet…
Ground control to Captain Ziggy. Hello, Zig, are you there? It would seem that with Heathen, David Bowie has invited not only old aliases like Major Tom and Ziggy Stardust to the party, but also familiar collaborators like producer Tony Visconti and Pete Townshend. Heathen is Bowie’s most Bowie-sounding album…
